This Beautiful Life

by Helen Schulman (HarperCollins; $24.99)

An underage girl at a private school makes a pornographic video for a classmate; unsurprisingly, it ends up going viral. Drawing on a real-life school scandal and using multiple narrators, Schulman’s novel examines the effects of the incident on the family of the teen-aged boy who disseminated the video. Schulman presents her privileged characters as archetypes—the “golden boy” father, the bored stay-at-home mom, and the confused teen-ager—a decision that, unfortunately, makes them less memorable and less sympathetic than they might have been. At one point, the son reads “The Great Gatsby” and notes the line where Tom and Daisy “retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness . . . and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Schulman presents her characters in this Fitzgeraldean mode, but she doesn’t give us a reason to care about them. ♦